I am a part of a team of UNBC researchers that aim to provide best practice recommendations for operational practices associated with the construction of a natural gas pipeline. My focus will be on identifying restoration treatments that favor the movement of small mammals along an across the corridor created by the pipeline right-of-way. We are currently developing an optimized noninvasive sampling approach that will target a number of small/meso forest dwelling mammals.

Invasive alien species have been introduced to new area for as long as humans have traveled and have become one of the most important cause for the loss of biodiversity worldwide. In order to better understand why certain species spread and become invasive, I am interested in studying population genetics and invasion history of invasive organisms. During my MSc I had the opportunity to work on Invasive Olives (Olea europeae) from Australia and Hawaii (see Besnard et al., 2007a, 2007b). I then focused on Invasive Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) in the western Swiss Alps. This plant was introduced to temperate areas of the world through the horticultural industry due to its beautiful and imposing inflorescences. It has now established invasive populations in over 20 European countries as well as in the USA and Canada. Besides being a treat to native flora, Giant Hogweed is a toxic plant that is becoming a health hazard for people living in invaded areas. Such studies using the tools of population genetics of invasive plants will help identify invasion pathways as well as the main dispersal agents (roads, rivers, etc) and will ultimately be useful in establishing an eradication plans for such undesirable species. (See Henry et al., 2008 for primer design and Henry et al., 2009 for population genetic study). An ongoing collaboration seeks to begin to shed light on the genetic basis of invasiveness in the Giant Hogweed by using genome scans and samples from throughout native and invaded range.

The Amur or Siberian Tiger is a critically endangered felid. Due to human pressures, its population plummetted to 20-30 individuals in the 1940s. Conservation efforts in the wild have enabled the population to rebound to an estimated 500 individuals. In the meantime, a captive population was set up mainly in European and North American Zoo (with a total of 421 individuals). This project aims to compare the amount of genetic variability remaining in the wild compared to the captive population. Moreover, we are interested in the demographic history of the wild population and will investigate how a development corridor between two cities in the Russian Far East has affected the population genetic structure of the remaining wild Amur tiger population. In our recently published work (Henry et al., 2009) we found a low effective population size in the wild Amur tiger of 35 individuals. We also discovered that this population was split into two by a development corridor between the cities of Vladivostok and Ussurisk. This has important implication for the future conservation measures that should focus on creating forest corridors to enable the tigers to move from one population to the next. Moreover we found that the captive breeding program has successfully maintained genetic diversity comparable to that found in the wild.

A major gap in conservation genetics has been to identify genomic regions that display signals of positive selection and can thus be use to prioritize population for conservation action and/or assisted migration. I have thus been investigating the adaptive genetic variation in the American Pika (Ochotona princeps) using emerging tools of conservation genomics. I have developed a noninvasive sampling technique well suited to the species in order to obtain large quantities of their hair that would provide the DNA for my study (Henry, Henry & Russello, 2011 and Henry & Russello 2011). American Pikas have recently been identified as an early warning for climate change in mountainous regions of North America. We have sampled Pika populations along three altitudinal gradients in the Coast Mountains of BC (Henry, SIm & Russello, 2012), and have investigated how these populations differ at the genomic level. This entailed using AFLP genomic scans to identify outlier loci (areas of the genome exhibiting signatures of selection) in pika populations along the altitudinal gradients. This study will represent one of the first applications of population genomics in a species of conservation concern (Henry & Russello, 2013). In addition to the work undertaken as part of my PhD thesis, we are currently typing the above populations at genome wide SNPs and will extend the sampling efforts in order to test for genomic signals of selection along latitudinal gradients ranging from Oregon to central Alberta and British Columbia and habitat characteristics of pika populations along an elevation gradient.

Recreational Genomics is a consortium of cannabis aficionados, cannaseurs, breeders and growers involved in developing genomic resources to advance marker assisted as well as genomic selection to understand and enhance the human-cannabis relationship. Identifying markers related to plant vigor, active compound synthesis, pest resistance and coloration are currently being investigated using open access data generated and hosted by NCBI UofT and the Medicinal Genomics Corporation.

420andMe : crowdsourcing the Cannabis / Human relationship

Cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.) is often cited as the most commonly used recreational drug worldwide. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health confirms this assertion, showing that about 34% to 42% of Americans have used cannabis in their lifetime (one-time users), 10% to 12% have used it in the past year (casual users), 6% to 7% are regular users and about 4% are chronic users. While most participants may experience a feeling of relaxation, exuberance, laughter and/or hunger, others may react differently and exhibit social anxiety or other negative responses. Such outcomes may be mediated by individual differences in gene encoding the endocannabinoid system and other associated regulatory enzymes. In this crowdsourced genome-wide association study, I intend to harness the large amounts of data generated by direct-to-consumer genetic testing through a web-based repository platform to collect genotypic and phenotypic data called OpenSNP.

COMT polymorphism and cognitive effects of cannabis use: In the first study using a purely non-clinical cohort, Tunbridge et al. (2015) report on an additional player in the ECS pathways, the Catechol-O-Methyl-Transferase (COMT) gene polymorphism (Val(158)Met). Their data suggests that COMT genotype moderates the cognitive, but not the psychotic, effects of acutely administered THC, with the Met variant, providing protection to impaired cognitive performance experience by participants with Val variants.Collaborators: OpenSNP, Genesforgood, Dr. Natasha Ryz @ UBC, The Healing Company

Distribution of SNPs in the THCAS gene based on 58 accessions publicly available on NCBI database

Description of variants in the THCAS homologues and CBDAS gene. Green indicates diagnostic SNPs between active and inactive homologues. Nomenclature follows published work by